NASA's Cassini spacecraft is now less than a month away from its close encounter with Saturn and its moons. It's been traveling for almost seven years and on July 1, 2004 at 0230 UTC (10:30 pm EDT, June 30), the spacecraft will officially enter orbit around the Ringed Planet. On board Cassini are 12 instruments which will be used to analyze Saturn and its moons over the course of 4 years to understand their chemistry, magnetic fields, and interactions. Cassini is carrying a passenger; the European Space Agency's Huygens probe, which will be deployed on December 25, 2004 to land on the surface of Titan, Saturn's largest moon.
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We're only a few days away from an event that no person alive has ever seen: a transit of Venus across the surface of the Sun. On June 8, 2004, approximately 75% of people on Earth will be able to watch as the tiny black dot marches across the Sun over the course of about six hours. NASA and several observatories around the world have joined forces to broadcast the event live on the Internet for the benefit of those on the wrong side of the planet, or without the right equipment to watch it. If you don't see it this time, don't worry, it'll happen again on June 6, 2012 and then again in another 105 years.
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NASA has announced the guest speakers who will help set the tone for the upcoming Centennial Challenges workshop on June 15/16. The purpose of this workshop will be to define space-related goals which individuals and groups could complete to win prizes - similar to the Ansari X-Prize, which awards $10 million for the first private suborbital spacecraft. The featured speakers are Senator Sam Brownback, R-Kan., Chairman, Commerce Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space, Dr. John H. Marburger III, Director, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Edward C. "Pete" Aldridge, Chairman, President's Commission on Moon, Mars and Beyond and Elon Musk, CEO and CTO, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation.
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A new photo released from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a new close-up view of the heart of the Trifid Nebula, also known as M20 and NGC 6514. One part features a region of the nebula that contains a group of young, hot stars which are blasting the surrounding area with ultraviolet radiation, and clearing out gas and dust. Another part of the nebula contains a low mass star which is ejecting a long jet of material. Previous images of the jet taken in 1997 show small but noticeable changes in its shape.
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The latest full colour image of Saturn was taken on May 21, when NASA's Cassini spacecraft was only 15.7 million kilometres (9.8 million miles) from the Ringed Planet. Cassini took images through its blue, green, and red filters using its narrow angle camera, which were combined to create this natural colour view. The photo shows subtle, multi-hued atmospheric bands across the face of the planet, and the rings show slight colour differences. The chemicals the cause these colour differences are still unknown to scientists - that's part of the mystery Cassini is here to solve.
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Well into their extra exploration time, NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers are continuing to make discoveries on the Red Planet. Spirit has nearly completed the journey to Columbia Hills, several kilometres from the landing spot, and it can already see what might be layered rock in an outcropping. On the other side of the planet, Opportunity is still on the rim of "Endurance Crater", searching for a potential entrance into the crater, and examining the texture of rocks.
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Combined data from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Palomar 200-inch telescope have uncovered the remnant of a gamma-ray burst - one of the most powerful known explosions in the Universe - in our galactic neighborhood. W49B is a barrel-shaped nebula located 35,000 light-years from Earth. In the cosmic wreckage of the explosion, astronomers have found chemicals consistent with the collapsar model of a gamma-ray burst. In this model, a massive star forms inside a cloud of dust and gas and then becomes a black hole, creating a powerful explosion.
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Astronomers with the European Southern Observatory have embarked on a decade-long study of some of the largest structures, galaxy clusters, to try and understand the nature of the earliest Universe. According to the widely accepted "inflationary theory" of the cosmos, tiny fluctuations in the initial state of the Universe were magnified by the Big Bang. Microscopic differences at the beginning have become super-clusters of galaxies. A previous survey used X-ray observatories to identify 447 of the brightest clusters of galaxies, which will now be studied further to map out their shape.
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The first privately built manned spacecraft will rocket into space on June 21 according to a recent announcement from Scaled Composites. The company's SpaceShipOne will fly to an altitude of 100 km (62 miles), and whoever pilots it will be the first private citizen to receive astronaut wings for heading into space. Although SpaceShipOne is aiming for the Ansari X-Prize, it won't be on this attempt, since the spacecraft will only be carrying the pilot. To win the prize, SpaceShipOne will need to carry the equivalent weight for two more passengers and complete the journey to space twice within two weeks.
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NASA announced on Tuesday that it was officially considering sending a robotic mission to save the Hubble Space Telescope, instead of de-orbiting it in a few years. The agency has called for proposals from the aerospace community to come up with a robot that can be controlled from the ground, and perform the complex upgrades and repairs that previously required astronauts. They need to hurry, though, since the observatory is expected to begin failing around 2007.
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The latest image released from the Spitzer Space Telescope is of galaxy M33, also known as the Pinwheel Galaxy. It's a very familiar object to visible astronomy, but in Spitzer's infrared gaze, the galaxy reveals some of its "coolest" features; clouds of dust created in novae and supernovae, and then blown around the galaxy in winds from giant stars. M33 is 50,000 light years across and nearly perfectly face on, so you can see right to its centre - a place obscured by gas and dust in our own Milky Way.
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Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have found what they believe is an intermediate sized black hole at the heart of a nebula in a nearby galaxy. Since black holes themselves are invisible, they located it because a spot inside the nebula is emitting a tremendous amount of X-rays, and illuminating a 100 light-year swath. By calculating the amount of X-rays pouring out, astronomers estimate that the black hole has about 25-40 solar masses. It's unknown how these intermediate-sized black holes form, since so few of them have ever been seen.
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Most research seems to indicate that planets form around stars in only the first few million years. Many stars have protoplanetary disks at one million years, but they're all gone by 10 million years. The trick for astronomers is to find stars in that in-between age, and catch planets in the act of forming around the parent stars. One star, Trumpler 37, seems to be at that middle age and is actively accreting material at the equivalent of 10 Jupiter masses in a million years.
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A team of European astronomers has used a virtual observatory to find 30 previously undiscovered black holes. The team combined images from several observatories (Hubble, Chandra, ESO) in many wavelengths of light (from infrared to X-ray) into a comprehensive computer catalog of the night sky. They uncovered these new black holes by looking at galaxies which are edge on, so the supermassive black holes at their centre are obscured by a cloud of gas and dust. By comparing between the different wavelengths of light, they were able to spot the new black holes.
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In this latest image of Saturn taken by Cassini, you can see several of the storms that rage across the planet's atmosphere. The largest of these storms is 3,000 km across (1,800 miles). There are also light-coloured, lacy cloud patterns that show atmospheric turbulence. This photo was taken on May 7, when Cassini was 28.2 million km (17.5 million miles) away.
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A Russian cargo spacecraft successfully docked with the International Space Station on Thursday, bringing much needed supplies to the astronauts. On board the Progress 14P spacecraft are 2.5 metric tonnes (2.76 tons) of water, food, air, propellant, as well as scientific equipment. The ship also carries a Russian Orlan-M spacesuit, which will replace a malfunctioning US-built one. It will be needed when the astronauts make a spacewalk in June to fix a power control and circuit breaker box for one of the station's four gyroscopes.
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NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has peered through the dusty haze into the construction zones for new planets and found organic molecules. A team from the University of Rochester surveyed five very young stars in the constellation of Taurus and found these icy organic molecules around all of them. They also found a gap in the planetary disc around a million-year old star, which indicates that a young planet is already forming. This is much earlier than predicted by previous models of planet formation.
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Astronomers can measure the reflectivity of the Earth's atmosphere by watching "Earthshine" on the Moon. They found that a gradual dimming of this light from Earth reflected against the Moon matches the warming of the planet's lower atmosphere over the last two decades. The possibility that decreased cloud cover could cause climate change is still controversial, and many scientists are skeptical about this new research. Interestingly, the astronomers who produced this recent study have found that the trend is reversing, with Earthshine increasing again.
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It seems that our Milky Way is producing stars much more rapidly than previously predicted by many astronomers. This is according to new research supported by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which was focused on Nebula RCW49. In visible light, there isn't much to see because its heart is shrouded in dust, but in the infrared spectrum, which largely ignores the blocking effect of the dust, astronomers have spotted more than 300 proto-stars in this stellar nursery. And there are many regions like this throughout our galaxy; and probably all galaxies.
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As Saturn grows larger in Cassini's camera, scientists have turned many instruments on the ringed planet, including the Hubble Space Telescope. This latest release from Hubble matches up a photo of Saturn taken by the great observatory on May 22 with one taken by Cassini on May 16. It's only Hubble's incredible optics that give it a similar view to Saturn, but that's about to end as Cassini is now only a month away from its destination. The colour differences between the images are due to the different filters used on Hubble and Cassini.
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Today's image released by NASA, and taken by its Cassini spacecraft is a close up view of Saturn's rings, and several of its moons: Mimas, Epimetheus, and Enceladus. The image was taken on May 10 with Cassini's narrow angle camera when the spacecraft was 27.1 million kilometres away (16.8 million miles).
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In case you haven't seen it with your own eyes yet, here's a 1024x768 desktop wallpaper of Comet NEAT, which is currently fading from the evening sky. The image was taken using the National Optical Astronomy Observatory's 0.9 metre WIYN at Kitt Peak, with the Mosaic I camera. The small star cluster at the lower right of the image is Melotte 72. Comet NEAT was discovered in August 24, 2001 by the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking system managed by NASA's JPL.
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An unmanned Soyuz rocket launched a Progress cargo spacecraft towards the International Space Station on Tuesday. It lifted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome at 1234 UTC (8:34 am EDT), and placed the spacecraft into the proper orbit a few minutes later. Progress 14P is carrying propellant, oxygen, air, and water, as well as 1.2 tonnes of dry cargo, like food and equipment. The spacecraft will reach the station on Thursday.
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Quasars are some of the brightest and most distant objects ever observed, and astronomers used to believe they only existed inside giant or disrupted galaxies, with supermassive black holes relentlessly consuming matter at their cores. But new research using the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii shows that they live in some of the more boring galaxies in the Universe. Under the current theories, the powerful twin 8-metre telescopes should have found enormous galaxies in chaos, but they didn't. Only one galaxy could actually be detected, and it wasn't much different from our own Milky Way galaxy.
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NASA has released more detailed requirements for its upcoming mission to Jupiter's icy moons. The Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter would travel to the Jovian system, and then spend time orbiting Callisto, Ganymede and Europa; each of which might have liquid oceans under their icy surfaces. The mission would be powered by a nuclear reactor, and use ion propulsion to get into and out of various orbits. The Request for Proposal has been delivered to Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman, and they have until July 16, 2004 to deliver their conceptual designs.
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The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft is scheduled to meet up with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 10 years. It'll get to do some science before then, however, starting with Comet LINEAR, which is 95 million kilometres away (59 million miles). On April 30, Rosetta took a photograph of the comet using its OSIRIS camera system, which was already scheduled for commissioning on that date. Rosetta studied the comet in different wavelengths, from ultraviolet to microwave, and took a high resolution image in blue light.
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To celebrate Cassini's arrival at Saturn, the imaging team is going to be releasing a new photograph every day detailing some different aspect of the planet and its moons until the spacecraft enters the system in July. The latest photograph was taken on May 10, and is of swirling bands of turbulent clouds in Saturn's atmosphere. It was taken when Cassini was only 27.2 million km (16.9 million miles) away from the planet.
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Astronomers with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have found the heaviest star ever seen - 80 times the mass of our Sun - and it's got a twin. Located 20,000 light-years from Earth, the two massive stars in WR 20a go around each other every 3.7 days. These two stars are very young, probably only 2-3 million years old, and highly unstable. It'll only be a few more million years before they explode, one after the other as supernovas.
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It seems that when an asteroid struck the Earth 65 million years ago, the resulting heat pulse incinerated every dinosaur on the planet in just a few hours; only those that were in burrows or underwater likely survived. When the 10 km (6 mile) asteroid hit Chicxulub in the Yucatan, it struck with the force of 100 million megatons of TNT. A new paper published by several US university researchers calculates how ejected material would have heated the atmosphere to the equivalent of a global oven set on broil.
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Researchers from Penn State University have developed a computer model that describes the interaction of a binary black hole system; where two black holes orbit one another. Previous models have fallen apart because the gravity of the black holes distorts the surrounding space so dramatically, it's almost impossible to calculate. This unusual situation could generate gravity waves detectable from Earth, which so far have only been theorized by mathematicians.
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It's been a month since NASA launched the Gravity Probe B; an experiment designed to test Einstein's predictions about gravity and relativity, and so far, the spacecraft is working well. It's in the correct orbit and will begin the science phase of its mission next month. It will continue taking precise measurements of the Earth's gravity over the next 13 months to test two predictions: how space and time are warped by our planet, and how the Earth drags space-time around with it as it rotates.
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The European Space Agency released its official inquiry into the loss of the Beagle 2 lander, and made 19 recommendations for future missions to the surface of the Red Planet. No one has been able to get to the root cause for the loss of Beagle 2's, but it could have been because of a thinner than expected Martian atmosphere, a problem with its airbag system, or a failure to deploy its solar panels, which cover up the lander's main antenna.
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The newest photo released by NASA's Cassini spacecraft was taken on May 10, 2004 at a distance of only 27.2 million kilometres (16.9 million miles) using the spacecraft's narrow angle camera. The image shows the translucent C ring and the thin, outermost F ring, which cast a shadow across the clouded atmosphere. Cassini will arrive at Saturn in July, 2004 and begin a long term study of the ringed planet and its moons.
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A new theory from researchers at Arizona State University challenges the traditional view of the formation of our Solar System. Instead of forming within an out-of-the-way cloud of interstellar gas and dust, they believe we formed in the intense environment that typically creates more massive stars. The core of their argument is the recent discovery of iron-60 in meteorites; this isotope can only be found in the heart of massive stars. This could mean that the Sun formed while a more massive star was nearby, blasting our environment with intense ultraviolet radiation.
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NASA has released fragments from the space shuttle Columbia to a non-government group for the first time since the accident for study. The Aerospace Corporation, in El Segundo, California requested and will receive graphite/epoxy honeycomb skins from several sections of the destroyed spacecraft. The Aerospace Corporation will hold onto the debris for a year, and perform a series of tests to understand the maximum temperatures that it faced during re-entry. Several other "Request for Information" applications are still being considered by NASA.
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M82, or the Starburst Galaxy, is one of the most studied galaxies in the night sky. New research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison has shed light on a cosmic hurricane that lives inside the galaxy, and sends out a stream of particles at more than 1.6 million km/h (1 million mph). These violent winds which go for thousands of light-years above and below the galaxy were caused because of M82's near miss with the neighboring spiral galaxy M81; this set off an explosive burst of star formation.
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While searching for near Earth-asteroids, astronomers at Lowell Observatory found an object which orbits closer to the Sun than any other asteroid. Designated 2004 JG6, the asteroid is probably between 500 - 1,000 metres in diameter (1,600 - 3,200 feet) and takes about six months to go around the Sun. Objects like this, which travel within Earth's orbit are called Apoheles, and they're very difficult to discover because they spend so much time near the Sun, invisible to telescopes in the daytime sky. Fortunately, 2004 JG6 poses no threat to Earth.
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A team of astronomers led by the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy have found evidence that asteroids change colour as they get older. The team used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which has accurate colour measurements on 100,000 asteroids. They found that asteroids turn redder over time because of the constant bombardment of radiation from the Sun and cosmic rays. With more research, astronomers should soon be able to judge the age of an asteroid just by its colour.
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The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) MUSES-C spacecraft snapped pictures of the Earth and Moon as it made a flyby past our planet. The maneuver is called a gravity assist, which uses the Earth's gravity to give the spacecraft a boost in speed. The ion engine powered spacecraft skimmed past our planet at an altitude of only 3700 km before continuing on towards its final target: Asteroid Itokawa (1998SF36). It will reach the asteroid in summer 2005, and then spend 5 months orbiting and collecting samples from its surface. It will then leave the asteroid and return the samples to Earth in 2007.
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An Atlas IIAS placed an SES Americom television broadcast satellite into orbit on Wednesday, marking the 72nd consecutive flight for the Atlas family. The rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral at 2222 UTC (6:22 pm EDT), and placed the AMC-11 satellite into a transfer orbit 28 minutes later. This was the second to last launch for the Atlas 2 family of boosters. The final launch will carry a military payload in July.
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NASA's Cassini spacecraft turned its gaze on Saturn's mysterious moon Titan again, taking another early look at its haze-obscured surface. The spacecraft was 29.3 million kilometres (18.2 million miles) when it took this picture with its narrow angle camera. Cassini's pictures of Titan are now better than anything that can be taken with Earth-based telescopes. Scientists will get an even better view of Titan when the spacecraft reaches Saturn and its moons in July 2004.
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NASA has been working for the past several months to implement the changes requested by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. The Stafford-Covey Task Group released their second interim report today, which tracks the status of the Return to Flight effort. Three of the fifteen recommendations have been completed, and they expect to wrap up several more by the summer. One of the most difficult tasks so far has been to eliminate falling debris during launch - it was a piece of foam that fell off the fuel tank that critically damaged Columbia - engineers are worried that the only way to test if the problem has been fixed is by actually launching the shuttle.
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Space tourism company Space Adventures announced on Wednesday that they've completed a deal to send an unnamed Japanese celebrity to the International Space Station. The deal was negotiated with Dentsu, the world's largest advertising agency, which had previously organized a commercial filmed on board the station for Pocari Sweat (a sport drink). Space Adventures has now filled two of its four allocated seats on Soyuz launches over the next few years. The other seat will go to Greg Olsen, who's currently training at Russia's Star City in preparation for his launch as early as October.
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When you lock a bunch of humans in a small space for a long time, they can go a little crazy. So researchers from the Australian National University are trying to understand the dynamics that might afflict a long-term space mission, and offer some solutions to make things easier. Volunteers from the Mars Society will travel to the Australian desert, and attempt to mimic some of the conditions experienced by long-duration space travelers. The researchers will test them daily, and watch for detachment, disagreements, and see if the larger group will splinter off into smaller subgroups.
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A mysterious force, which astronomers call "Dark Energy", seems to be speeding up the expansion of the Universe. New observations from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory have independently confirmed this expansion by measuring the distances to galaxy clusters. It seems that the expansion of the Universe was slowing down after the Big Bang until 6 billion years ago; at that point the force of this dark energy took over and expansion began to speed up. The big mystery still remains... what is dark energy?
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If you've ever sat back on a summer's day and wondered, really wondered, what it's all about, then you've likely wandered a bit through time. Perhaps you've thought back to seminal days like the first launch of a rocket, the definition of gravity or perhaps the beginnings of human civilization. Peter Ward in his book Gorgon extends this timeline further, in particular to the mass extinction at the end of the Permian period. Though occurring more than 250 million years ago, Peter brings his investigation and personal events into a warm, thoughtful prose that can add great spice to many a wonder.
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NASA is gearing up to launch its next satellite that will monitor the health of the Earth's atmosphere. Aura, which is currently scheduled to lift off on June 19, will carry four instruments designed to survey different aspects of the atmosphere, from the troposphere (where we live) to the high stratosphere. It will help determine the rate at which the ozone layer is recovering, and track the sources and processes that determine global air quality.
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Researchers from the University of Arizona have recreated some of the chemicals thought to be in the atmosphere of Titan, Saturn's largest moon. It's unique in the Solar System, with a thick haze of hydrocarbons; some scientists believe it's a similar environment to our own planet's early history. They created these chemicals by bombarding an analog of Titan's atmosphere with electrons, which produces "tholins" (organic polymers). These have been detected from Earth-based telescopes. By dissolving these tholins in liquid water creates amino acids, which are the building blocks for life.
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